• Who We Are
• Our History
• The Children's
  Village at Beaver Run
• Transition Program
  at Beaver Farm
• Camphill School of
  Curative Education
• Board of Directors and Staff

Camphill Special School is a Waldorf school, as well as a Pennsylvania Approved Private School, for children with intellectual and developmental disabilities. We are part of the worldwide Camphill movement and the only Camphill community in North America for children.

We offer residential and day academic and prevocational programs, as well as therapeutic care, for children in kindergarten through grade twelve. We also offer a Transition Program for young people ages eighteen to twenty-one.

The Camphill Movement

Dr. Karl Koenig, an Austrian pediatrician who fled the Nazis and settled in Scotland in 1939, founded what is known across the world today as the “Camphill Movement.” Camphill is based on the principles of anthroposophy, the philosophy of Rudolf Steiner that seeks to integrate spirit, body, and soul. Steiner formulated the concept of curative education, which includes the arts as healing and educational forces, and his influence is felt in Camphill Special School’s adapted Waldorf curriculum.

Camphill Special School is a Waldorf school, as well as a Pennsylvania Approved Private School, for children with intellectual and developmental disabilities. We are part of the worldwide Camphill movement and the only Camphill community in North America for children.

We offer residential and day academic and prevocational programs, as well as therapeutic care, for children in kindergarten through grade twelve. We also offer a Transition Program for young people ages eighteen to twenty-one.

All around the world, more than one hundred Camphill communities in over twenty countries take different forms. Every community, however, is dedicated to social renewal through community building - with children, youth, and adults with disabilities. The Camphill ideal is to engage all the members of each community in meeting their own needs, as well as those of the community at large, to whatever extent their abilities allow.

Like all Camphill communities, the continuity and future development of Camphill Special School depends on a core of committed coworkers who maintain Camphill's values and mission and impart it to others. As members of the Camphill Movement, they are committed to high standards of care, self-sacrifice, and self-development. Please click here for a bibliography of readings about the Camphill Movement. Concerning membership in the Camphill Movement, click

here.

Camphill Special School is the only Camphill community in North America that specifically serves children and the only Waldorf school that exclusively serves children with special needs.

We also operate the Camphill School of Curative Education, which prepares its graduates to work with children and adolescents with developmental disabilities by combining traditional academic coursework with hands-on teaching and community living experience, and host the Dorion School of Music, a course of study leading to certification in music therapy.

Camphill Special School does not discriminate on the basis of race, age, color, creed, gender, sexual orientation, national or ethnic origin, or disability.

Rides in the pony cart are part of every Kindergarten student's experience! Drama, art, and music are essential to our Waldorf curriculum.

In Village Life: The Camphill Communities, (1986) volunteer coworker (coworker is the Camphill expression for a caregiver) Wanda Root wrote: Camphill is a way of life. It is not a job. There are no shifts, no salaries, no relative values placed on people according to the nature of the work  that they do…Tasks are undertaken for the good of the whole, out of a sense of commitment and responsibility…Community life is the work of Camphill. People with enormously varied capabilities, talents, and needs, live and work together day after day.

Village Life may be purchased by visiting the
Camphill Foundation website.